This is my all-time favorite dream, which I had when I was eighteen years old. I found it written out on an old floppy disk, along with my other two favorite dreams, George Harrison and The Organ Man. I’m sure you’ll enjoy all three of them.

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It was a beautiful spring day, and I was sitting on my old Honda motorcycle outside a small outdoor shopping center in Yakima with a railroad theme. It was one of the few historical landmarks in town, and there was a great little ice cream shop there, with a cute server girl who was a friend of mine.

I was holding a bag of Hydrox cookies in a plastic grocery bag that was dangling from my handlebars. It’s amazing what one can accomplish when one has no other options. I’ve held many a bag of groceries from the handlebars of that motorcycle, let me tell you. As I was looking left and right, scanning traffic to make a turn from the parking lot onto Yakima Avenue, two early teenage kids ran by and attempted to snatch my bag, but since the handles of the bag were wrapped around the handlebars, they did not succeed. I was not amused. “I’d better hide these,” I resolved to myself, tucking the bag inside my brown leather jacket and zipping it up all the way.

I revved the engine a bit and looked to my left at the oncoming traffic, where I saw a small crowd of maybe ten or fifteen people milling around on the sidewalk in front of the Oriental Garden restaurant about a block away. They appeared to be looking for someone. A middle-aged guy turned and looked directly at me for an unnerving second, then pointed me out and yelled to his cohorts, “There he is!” They all turned and started to run in my direction. “Let’s get him!” someone shouted. Not being one to suffer hostile mobs gladly, I revved up the motorcycle and turned right onto Yakima Avenue, away from the crowd. Looking across the street, I saw the two kids running in the same direction I was going, and one of them had a bag of Oreo cookies in his hand, which was startlingly similar to my own bag of Hydrox. “Ah,” I realized, in a flash of inspiration. “They must think I’m those kids.”

Suddenly the motorcycle became extremely sluggish. When I turned the throttle, the engine revved slightly but dipped immediately afterwards. It eventually came to a stop just short of where the kids were running, and I had to resort to the time-honored ambulatory means of escape. The kids saw me approaching and, thinking I was chasing them, took off running even faster. I ran across the street to the far side of Yakima Avenue.

Glancing over my shoulder to where the crowd had been only seconds before, I noticed that they were now crossing the street toward me. I tried to run but was unable to. I tried to walk fast, but was pathetically unable to manage that either. Panicked now, with the crowd coming ever closer, I tried to coax my leaden legs to get me away, but it was to no avail. The menacing mob closed in around me. They pushed me to the ground and, despite my protestations, poked and prodded me from all sides, trying to unzip my jacket and remove my precious cargo. . .the Hydrox cookies.

Lying on my back, with the crowd of people on top of me, digging their fingers into my jacket, I finally relented, salvaging the vestiges of my dignity in the only way I could. I fought off the offending hands with one hand, and unzipped my jacket with the other, slowly revealing the telltale blue and yellow bag. I shouted at the crowd incredulously, desperately, gesturing frantically at the label on the bag with my free hand. “They’re only Hydrox! They’re only Hydrox!”